Resizing Wallpaper for Netbook Screens

My netbook computer has an odd size for the screen resolution. The screen is at 1024 x 600 pixels. As a result, if you a looking for some cool wallpapers to use for the background, it is hard to find something that is the right size. In this article we will discuss a couple of techniques for resizing wallpaper to fit nicely on the netbook screen.

For this article, I'm using a wallpaper called Drone 9 that I found on WinCustomize.com. When you download the wallpaper it comes in a variety of sizes. In this case, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1600x1200, and 1920x1200. So, the first question is which one do I use for my conversion?

A trick is to divide the screen resolution width by height. So, in this case, 1024 / 600 = 1.71. Then do the same for the available wallpaper sizes and see which resolution comes the closet to matching my screens proportions. In this case 1440 / 900 = 1.6. So, we will try that one.

You are going to need some software to use for modifying the picture. Something simple for us graphics simpletons (or else we would be creating our own wallpaper instead of modifying others). A great piece of software for this is Paint.Net. This easy to use graphics program can be downloaded for free from getpaint.net. So, we will assume that you have downloaded and installed Paint.Net and are ready to give this a shot.

ResizeDialog Open the picture in Paint.Net. Next, from the menu, choose Image: Resize to bring up the resize dialog box. You want to maintain the aspect ration or else the picture could appear to be stretch out in one direction. So, I've entered 1024 in the width box. Notice the height will be 640 which is a little taller than our screen.

Select this choice by clicking the OK button.

The next step is to clean up those extra 40 pixels of height that we don't need in our perfectly sized wallpaper. It too is quite simple to adjust. Again from the Image menu, choose the Canvas Size option.

Change the height to be 600 giving us the actual screen resolution for the netbook. In addition, the anchor section allows us to choose where we will lose the 40 pixels of height. In this case, we choose the center, meaning we lose twenty each at the top and the bottom.

That's it, you are done. Save your work to a new name and you can begin using your handiwork as a wallpaper background.

This technique also works well with digital photos that you have taken and want to make your own wallpaper out of them. Using the simple photo editing software, you will be able to crop, scale, resize and rotate your images to make the most attractive personal wallpaper around!

I would post my final version of the wallpaper, but I think that exercise is best left to you!